The Internet offers a tremendous amount of information on a wide range of subjects. Many businesses and organizations offer world-wide-web sites that promote products, offer technical assistance, and provide other useful information. Search engines (e.g., Yahoo™) typically can provide lengthy lists of sites related to any topic of interest. Users typically do not want to take the time to investigate more than a handful of these sites. As a result, the vast number of web-sites makes it difficult for web-site providers to lure Internet users to their respective sites.
Since the inception of the web, web-pages have featured links to other sites. A link can appear as underlined text (e.g., “please visit deskgate”), as a picture, or as a sequence of images. Each link has an associated URL (universal resource locator) that identifies a web-site. For example, the URL associated with the deskgate link is http://www.deskgate.com. A link can be programmed to transport a user to a link's associated URL when a user selects the link (e.g., by clicking a mouse button).
To attract users to a site, some businesses rent space on other web-pages. For example, as shown in FIG. 1, a newspaper web-page 100 includes a variety of links to other sites. As shown, the web-page includes a banner 102 (i.e., a picture link in the shape of a banner) linked to a resort's web-site. By selecting the link, the user is transported to the resort's web-page as shown in FIG. 2.